[iamzippy]

Congrats on the 2.1 update, it rocks. But I do have one minor needle request to make concerning the exposure of user bio information. Even when there is none.

The Symptom:

“Hey Admin dude, I may be incognito and unremarkable, but why draw attention to me like this?”

Cause:

Not checking if the description field in the user profile is empty (user-details.php).

Twentyten’s native bio box code is wrapped in a conditional that calls a hookable function, get_the_author_meta( ‘description’ ). Twentyten defaults to skipping the bio box completely if the user profile ‘description’ field is empty (on both single posts and author archives).
And thanks to the hook, the author of a child theme can also prevent display of this stuff based on any criteria they choose — like, author bio info is shared with logged-in users only.

The bbPress function bbp_get_displayed_user_field() isn’t currently hookable :(, but this whole thing is fixable with 3 or 4 lines of code in a couple of files. It’s not so much a bug as a lapse in coding consistency. Whatever, it’s busting my chops right now. If I didn’t know better, I’d ask for my money back 😉

Could this be put right in the next update? Makes for better consistency with WordPress, imho 🙂

Meanwhile, in other bbPress core-hacking news…

‘I also have a needle about the way author URL construction is similarly unhookable, but that’s for another thread’

[John James Jacoby]

Patches welcome. 🙂

[iamzippy]

Uh… OK. I’ll see if I can get my head around that.

You’re all heart, JJJ 😉

[John James Jacoby]

All kidding aside, if there’s an action or filter missing somewhere, let’s work together to make sure it’s there in 2.2.